Matthews: 'Conservative White Guys' Should Love the Obama Story

During Monday night’s live convention coverage on MSNBC, Chris Matthews chewed out the "culturally conservative person, I’m not saying bigoted person," who want "people in the ghetto" to get their act together. Why don’t they love the Obamas? "They have done everything that every conservative white guy had ever said everybody should do in this country." Instead, the unidentified conservative white guys allegedly fall back on "Oh he’s a Muslim!" They won’t acknowledge "This is the family Bill Cosby talks about."

Then it got weirder. Keith Olbermann replied that the Obama family makes the case for state intervention in the lives of the poor. Somehow, conservatives were lumped in with...the Chinese. "Maybe the system of intervention in people’s lives does work. Maybe you don’t want a government that, that, that decides, we’re, this is not gonna be China. We’re not decide at two-years-old...that your, your son is either going into the gymnastics program, diving or is gonna work in a factory."

MRC analyst Geoff Dickens transcribed this odd conversation from the top of the 10 pm hour on Monday night. Olbermann began by suggesting bizarrely that the Obama biographies were undercovered by the media and that all of the alienation and "strangeness" in the Obama story would evaporate if people would understand their struggling childhoods:

MATTHEWS: You know the people watching tonight who come from families where they’re lucky, where their parents are around, at least one parent, and they give up the stuff you don’t need like nightclubs, and steaks, and they concentrate on educational expenses, and taking care of the kids, whether it’s getting braces or getting piano lessons. You know the people have always said, "That’s what America is about." The parents to sacrifice for the kids. The kids that overcome difficulties, in fact being born without a parent. And yet the most culturally conservative person, I’m not saying bigoted person, the most culturally conservative person said, "Why don’t those people in the ghetto, why don’t they get their act together? Why don’t they do it? Why do they need affirmative action? Why do they have to have welfare? Why don’t they do it on their own?" Well here’s a guy and his wife, who got out there, her brother won a scholarship to play ball at Princeton! Okay? He got there on a grant or whatever. She gets an academic grant. She gets there. He gets into Columbia, then he gets into Harvard Law and then he makes the Law Review, editor of the Law Review. They have done everything that every conservative white guy has ever said everybody should do in this country. And then they fall back on the people that are critics, "Oh he’s a Mus-," like this wacko down here tonight. "Oh he’s a Muslim!" Some people just find it very hard to accept the fact that this family worked hard and played by the rules. They did it the way you’re supposed to do it. This is the Bill Cosby family. This is the family Bill Cosby talks about.

OLBERMANN: And the other thing that, that seems to be difficult to swallow about them, that same point of view that you just raised is this sense that maybe the system of intervention in people’s lives does work. Maybe you don’t want a government that, that, that decides, we’re, this is not gonna be China. We’re not decide at two years old --

MATTHEWS: Right.

OLBERMANN: – that your, your son is either going into the gymnastics program, diving or is gonna work in a factory. We’re not making that decision at two. But maybe we need to be responsible, at all times, to see how many, how many lifelines can you throw out to people and what, and the results can be like this. Why aren’t, why aren’t those results applauded in this nation at all times?

Can a more bizarre straw man be constructed with rhetorical twine than the idea that American conservatives believe that children should be segmented into career tracks at age two? Let alone the idea that American conservatives would believe that their beliefs in individual liberty and justice for all match a system of communist regimentation?